"Standing, or locus standi, is
capacity of a party to bring suit in court. State laws define standing.
At the heart of these
statutes isthe
requirement that plaintiffs have sustained or will sustain direct
injury or harm and that this harm is redressable.

At
the Federal level, legal actions cannot be brought simply on the ground
that an individual or group is displeased with a government action or
law. Federal courts only have constitutional authority to resolve
actual disputes (see Case or Controversy). Only
those with enough direct stake in an action or law have "standing" to
challenge it."
Cornell University Law School

Our
attorneys have already made very extensive and persuasive arguments, that are part of the court record, to support the
Standing of the GOGP as well as Sandy Taylor, Terry Lynn Griffin,
Daniel Jerome Arvie, and Janet Lynn.
(All of these Plaintiffs were dismissed for lack of Standing.) They
will be consolidating and enhancing those arguments for the
appeal.

The
GOGP demonstrated the injury that it has suffered, and continues to
suffer, from fighting to end segregated Public Housing in Galveston.
Quite
simply, our injury was caused by
the fact that we had to delay our
original mission, to
reform City government, in order to deal with the local
Public
Housing crisis, at a
great cost of time and money.

See ICP v.
TDHCA:
The Court pointed
specifically to the“consequent
drain on the
organization's resources"as
evidence of that
injury.

See
Delaware
Valley
Toxics Coalition v. Kurz-Hastings: ...
the Delaware
Valley Toxics Coalition (DVTC) undertook a computer study to determine
if any local companies failed to submit required EPCRA reports. This
study required the DVTC to purchase
certain items and incur at least 250 hours of staff time. This
expenditure of time reduced the availability of staff to perform its
primary function; that is, disseminating information to educate and
train others. The court found that this constituted injury in fact,
fairly traceable to the defendant’s actions (or lack of), and likely to
be redressed by a favorable decision.

See Florida
State Conference of
NAACP v. Browning:(standing
exists where injury consisted of frustration of “actual ability to
conduct specific projects during a specific period of time,”
not “abstract social interests”).

Our four individual Plaintiffs, listed above, all had a personal stake
in
ending the practice of building segregated Public Housing in
impoverished neighborhoods, because when they need Public Housing, in
the future,
they want it to be in high-opportunity neighborhoods, which is their
right under the Fair Housing Act. The
GHA plan to rebuild it in
low-opportunity neighborhoods
creates the very high
probability that it will cause an injury to each of them.

Clearly,
their injuries have not yet occurred, but by building in highly
impoverished and segregated neighborhoods, their
injuries are
foreseeable, and a very
simple remedy is available to prevent those
injuries; a court order directing them to be built in
high-opportunity
neighborhoods, as defined and identified by Dr. McClure.

If highly-probable
future injuries do not confer standing on plaintiffs, then the function
of injunctions in the legal system becomes moot.
Withholding standing
for highly-probable future injuries forces all
prospective plaintiffs to actually experience future injuries before they can
seek relief. Shall we build Public Housing
projects in totally unacceptable neighborhoods and then force residents
to live
in them for years before they can seek to properly prove their injuries
and seek a remedy?

If the injury is proved at that point, the
plaintiffs would
have to be moved to a new location in a high-opportunity neighborhood
while
their former project is abandoned. Hardly an acceptable solution!
Why didn't we have a dozen
individual Plaintiffs who live in the City of Galveston? We certainly
could have, but the Poverty
Industry very
effectively intimidates many of our potential Plaintiffs,
so they are
afraid to ask the court to enforce their
rights.

Background:

When it comes to fair-housing,
the Standing issue is even more problematic, since Congress meant for
private plaintiffs to play a lead role in enforcing the law, so
Standing challenges frustrate enforcement and allow more violations to
continue. In this case, if
the GOGP does not try to enforce the law who
will? Texas Appleseed? TXLIHIS? The Galveston City
Council? The GHA? HUD?

But, if the
GOGP does not receive Standing, it cannot fulfill the role that
Congress intended private plaintiffs to perform!

"Thus, the Court
concluded: Since HUD has no enforcement powers and since the enormity
of the task of assuring fair housing makes the role of the Attorney
General in the matter minimal, the
main generating force must be
private suits in which ...the complainants act not only on their own
behalf but also "as private attorneys general in vindicating a policy
that Congress considered to be of the highest priority."99(See
Page 21 "Standing
to Sue in Fair Housing Cases")

Since the intent of Congress was/is to have "private attorneys general"
bring fair housing cases to the courts for litigation, why should any
case be considered for dismissal, due to Standing challenges, as long
as the
plaintiffs can present a prima facie case of violations? To do
otherwise frustrates the intent of the law.

"The language
and
structure of the Fair Housing Act indicate a
Congressional intention to
have Title VIII suits decided on the merits rather than on standing
grounds."(See Page 58 "Standing
to Sue in Fair Housing Cases")

Since it is clear that it was the intent of Congress that fair housing
cases be decided on the merits and not on Standing, and they saw a need
for "private attorney generals" to bring these cases for the public
good, why have any Plaintiffs
been dismissed in a case with such
egregious violations by government defendants?

What does HUD trial attorney
Dash T. Douglas say about the criteria being used to
decide Standing in these cases? "Unwarranted Use
of Judicial Restraint, 56 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 1074, 1075 (1988) (“Much
of the controversy surrounding the issue [of standing] may be traced to
the Supreme Court’s
inability to articulate clear standards for the
standing inquiry . . . This approach has left the doctrine in
a state
of ‘intellectual confusion’ leading to what many have found to be
unprincipled decision making . . . .”); Gene R. Nichol,
Jr., Rethinking
Standing, 72 CALIF. L. REV. 68, 68-70 (1984) (“In perhaps no other area
of constitutional law has scholarly commentary been so uniformly
critical . . . . The Court has
so severely manipulated the injury
standard that the foundation of standing law is essentially
incomprehensible.”); Paul A. LeBel, Standing After Havens
Realty: A
Critique and an Alternative Framework for Analysis, 1982 DUKE L.J.
1013, 1013 (stating that the
injury in fact requirement of standing
“has been shown to be a mutable and poorly defined standard”);
4
KENNETH CULP DAVIS, ADMINISTRATIVE LAW TREATISE § 24:35, at 342 (2d ed.
1983) (describing standing law
as “permeated with sophistry”)."
(See "STANDING
ON SHAKY GROUND: STANDING UNDER THE FAIR HOUSING ACT")
To review the GOGP's entire memo on Standing, click on the link below: